Theology has always had a “narrative” shape to it. The problem with propositional or systematic theologies is not that they are non-narrative but that they have reduced the dense historical narrative of scripture to a bare sequence of cosmic-level events: creation → fall → redemption → final judgment. Theology then systematically expounds those events.

In this crude “meta-narrative” the story about Jesus has two parts to it. There is the “Jesus is God” story about the eternally existent Second Person of the Trinity, who at a certain place and time in history became incarnate of the virgin Mary; and there is the “Jesus is man” story about the Saviour who died on the cross to redeem humanity from sin and death, before returning to heaven.

It appears that famous people like Michael Gungor and William Paul Young, author of The Shack, have been causing a stir by questioning the morality of the doctrine of atonement for sin. Owen Strachan, who is described on the Gospel Coalition website somewhat vaguely as a “systematic professor”, has offered a robust defence of the traditional view: Scandalized by the Substitute: A Response to Young and Gungor. I do not disagree with everything he says, but I think his approach illustrates very well how and why systematic theology is such a poor guide to the meaning of scripture. I offer a brief commentary on several of his statements.

One of the passages that crops up in discussions of what Paul meant when he talked about being conformed to or transformed into the image of Christ—and to whom that language applied—is Colossians 1:24. Davo mentioned it in a comment recently, and I have been meaning to get back to it.

The ESV translation of this verse is fairly typical: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church….”

On the face of it, Paul appears to be saying that Christ’s sufferings were somehow insufficient and that he himself needed to suffer in order to make up the deficit.

It was put to me by Crispin Fletcher-Louis on Facebook that my argument about being—or rather not being—transformed into the image of Christ is at odds with the general scholarly view these days that the so-called “Christ-hymn” of Philippians 2:6–11 is “determinative of Christian identity at every stage”. The objection is basically that Paul makes the story of Jesus’ suffering and vindication a universal model for Christian formation and ethics. Christian faith is inescapably cruciform. Crispin certainly knows a thing or two about these matters, but I will try to explain why I disagree.

Perhaps a bit more clarification is needed. I argued in the last piece on Hebrews that there is no deep metaphysical magic involved in what is said about atonement in the letter.

It is the resurrection that changes everything. This was a continuation of a couple of other posts setting out a “pragmatic non-theory of the atonement”.

I started looking at Hebrews 10 in order to reply to a comment from Chris Wooldridge, who cited the chapter as an example of how Jesus’ death is treated not only as a historical event but also as a theological or metaphysical event.

But you quickly discover that Hebrews 10 is part of a long, dense, tightly woven, intertextual (i.e. it draws extensively on the Old Testament) argument about the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for the community of Jewish believers (presumably) to whom the letter is written.

You can’t prise a few statements about Jesus’ death as a one-off sacrifice from it and expect them to stand up on their own as general theological propositions. They don’t. They fall over.

In his excellent essay on mystical transformation in Philo and Paul, Volker Rabens says of 2 Corinthians 3:18: “Many who have tried to grasp the nuances of Paul’s argument in this passage have at times felt that they themselves have a veil over their minds” (297-98). A.T. Hanson called it “the Mount Everest of Pauline texts as far as difficulty is concerned”. I will gladly take that as an excuse for my own vacillation over the interpretation of this passage in the last few posts (see the list below).

Anyway, here is another attempt to recapitulate Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians 3:14-18, with a further emendation prompted by Volker’s comment on my reading of “we all” in verse 18.